Thursday, February 07, 2008

Speaking of hamsters....

I keep thinking about the disaster hamster incident that happened when I as a teenager. For some reason, I decided I wanted a hamster. I think I was 15 or 16 at the time. We've always had pets as kids, and I happen to love to have as many little critters in my life to take care of and get annoyed by.

So I went to the pet store at the mall (remember those? With real live cats and dogs?) and purchased myself a nice female hamster. I don't remember what I called her, but I do remember what I changed her name to....

I kept her in a fish aquariaum. It was this octogan-shaped monstrosity on a stand. She made herself right at home. I was happy to have a new friend living with me.

My friend Brett came over a few days later, and I wanted to show him my new pal. I reached into the aquarium, grabbed hold of my hamster, and all these bloody red things dropped from her underside.

I think I passed out for a second. I thought it was her guts spilling out, and I couldn't understand how her belly opened up so her bloody guts could fall out of her.

That's when I realized they were babies. My female hamster had herself a whole mess of babies, and upon closer inspection, some of them were half eaten.

This was my introduction to wild life.

From this point on, her name was "Mama."

I was freaked out because 1. of the half-eaten hamsters, and 2. I ended up touching some of the living blood red babies. From my previous experience with....oh, nothing, I knew that touching the babies was not a good thing, and that they were probably goners as well.

A day later this proved to be true.

I gathered up my dead hamster baby bodies, put them in jewelery boxes and had a half-eaten baby hamster funereal in my mom's backyard.

Mama raised four babies. I kept two, my sister took one, and my friend down the street took the fourth.

Fairly quickly I knew I had a problem on my hands. I'm not sure how it's done, but if your domesticated hamster happens to have babies, those babies are not, by default, domesticated themselves. So how do hamsters become domesticated? Beats the heck out of me. I had one super nice hamster and two rabid, ready to kill anything that moved hamsters on my hands. They were also very clever and devious suckers as they figured out how to get out of the cages I had to put them in (they soon figured out how to get out of the monstrosity of a hamster aquarium -- don't ask. Devil hamsters?). Once night I heard a ton of racket going on, so I looked, and one hamster happened to be missing. Luckily I found it before it hid. I could have easily lost an eye or two that night.

My sister's hamster was just as bad, not to mention one fluffy little sucker. So fluffy that I was often convinced it couldn't be like one of its devil hamster siblings - until it hissed and bit. Imagine a big tuff of cotton ready to kill you.

I mean, these hamsters were pure evil.

So, without many options left and no love lost, we decided to rally them up and set them loose in a field. While this sounds mean, I think they were a lot happier out in the industrial area field, running free and killing anything in their path.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't even remember this hamster, so no love lost.

Nut Nut said...

Point proven! Poor, poor rabid devil hamsters....